CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

While many use cases for drones involve a remote human operator and/or an environment which is inaccessible to humans, social drones operate autonomously in environments inhabited by human users or bystanders.

Our electronic devices are not as resilient and reliable as mechanical ones, and our digital imprints are not cherished like physical ones. The reasons are technical, social, and economical; but they can be obviated through design.

Hotspotizer is an open-source application for users without programming skills to graphically design and implement custom full-body gesture sets for the Microsoft Kinect. The gestures are mapped to system-wide keyboard commands which can be used to control arbitrary applications.

Re-reading Ancient Artifacts for Design in Novel Form Factors

We proposed the "re-reading" of ancient artifacts to inform the design of future media on non-flat displays. As an example, we illustrated how different narrative typologies found in ancient Greek vases can inspire interactive content, which resulted in design implications for the graphic compositions on spherical displays.

Readout Automation and GUI for MEMS μ-cantilever Biosensor

For my bachelor's capstone, I contributed to a MEMS biosensor project at the KU Optical Microsystems Laborator (OML). The multi-analyte MEMS biosensor used an array of coated μ-cantilevers that shift their resonant frequencies upon analyte mass accretion. The cantilevers are magnetically actuated and their resonant frequencies are observed via interferometric optical readout. I designed and implemented a custom GUI and mechanism for setting up characterization experiments by directly manipulating the position of the chip relative to the laser beam. The system then traverses the μ-cantilever array and collects data without supervision.

Workstation for Laser Machining and Additive Manufacturing

As an undergraduate I contributed to the development of a versatile experimental laser manufacturing workstation with marking, cutting, engraving and powder sintering capabilities at the KU Manufacturing & Automation Research Center (MARC). We used a 10.6 μm CO2 laser coupled to a 3-axis CNC positioning system, as well as a galvo-driven 1064 nm Nd:YAG laser. The industrial lasers, AC servos, galvanometric scanner and sintering bed mechanism were driven with precision using a combination of open-source and custom software, and Arduino-based electronics, with integrated toolpath and G-code generation from STL models. The entire machine was designed, mechanically analyzed, fabricated and hand-assembled by a team of three.